Tag: Microsoft

In 2015, Microsoft introduced Edge, a homegrown browser it pitched as a modernized successor to Internet Explorer, and capable competitor to Google Chrome. Just three years later, Microsoft has raised a white flag, opting to rebuild Edge on Chromium, the same open-source rendering engine used by Chrome. As for Internet Explorer? Two years after its…

“We believe it’s important for governments in 2019 to start adopting laws to regulate” facial-recognition technology, said Microsoft President Brad Smith.Stephen McCarthy/Getty ImagesAfter a hellish year of tech scandals, even government-averse executives have started professing their openness to legislation. But Microsoft president Brad Smith took it one step further on Thursday, asking governments to regulate…

I always feel a bond with people who tell me they owned a Zune back in the day. Microsoft’s also-ran MP3 player never became a hit, but it was a fabulous little music machine and its influence can still be felt in the company’s hardware and software a decade later. Its Surface devices have put…

DURHAM, N.C., Oct. 10, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Open Invention Network (OIN) announced today that Microsoft has become a member of the OIN community. By joining OIN, Microsoft is demonstrating its commitment to open source software (OSS) and innovation through collaborative development. With more than 2,650 members, including numerous Fortune 500 enterprises, OIN is the…

Managing large application state easily and with high performance is one of the hardest problems in the cloud today. We present FASTER, a new concurrent key-value store designed for point lookups and heavy updates. FASTER supports data larger than memory, by leveraging fast external storage. What differentiates FASTER are its cache-optimized index that achieves very…

Over the past year, Silicon Valley has been grappling with the way it handles our data, our elections, and our speech. Now it’s got a new concern: our faces. In just the past few weeks, critics assailed Amazon for selling facial recognition technology to local police departments, and Facebook for how it gained consent from…

Panos Panay is the betting type. You can see the evidence in Microsoft’s Building 37, where two $1 bills stick out from beneath a Surface tablet sitting on a shelf. When I ask Panay about the dollars during a recent visit to Microsoft, he says it was a wager he made a few years back…

Bing has made very significant investments in the area of deep learning, computer vision and artificial intelligence to support a number of different search scenarios. The Bing Maps team has been applying these techniques as well with the goal to increase the coverage of building footprints available for OpenStreetMap. As a result, today we are…

Satya Nadella is chief executive of Microsoft, which announced last week that it is buying out code-sharing platform GitHub.Credit: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg/Getty GitHub — a website that has become popular with scientists collaborating on research data and software — is to be acquired by Microsoft for US$7.5 billion. In the wake of the takeover announcement on…

June 8, 2018 | By Microsoft blog editor At SIGMOD 2018, a team from Microsoft Research will be presenting a new embedded key-value store called FASTER, described in their paper “FASTER: A Concurrent Key-Value Store with In-Place Updates”. As its name suggests, FASTER makes a major leap forward in terms of supporting fast and frequent…